1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to monitoring the state of health of electrical connections and, more particularly, to detecting and prognosing electrical interconnection problems between an alternator and a battery.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
There is a constant effort in the automotive industry to improve the quality and reliability of vehicles by incorporating fault diagnosis and prognosis features into vehicles. Certain conditions, however, are more difficult to diagnose and predict than others, especially when the problems are intermittent. For example, the connections between a battery and an alternator are characteristically difficult to effectively monitor due to loosening connectors and/or corrosion that can cause anomalies to appear sporadically.
In addition, known techniques for monitoring the health of a battery or alternator are generally only capable of detecting a complete disconnection between the battery and alternator, not an intermittent or failing connection. Moreover, these techniques usually employ sophisticated signaling schemes that require additional hardware and that are difficult to implement on a vehicle due to the limited computational capacity of a vehicle's control unit.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for monitoring the state of health of the wiring between the battery and the alternator without adding additional hardware to the system.